A scathing UN report has sharply rebuked Mexico for its widespread problem with torture, which it said implicates all levels of the security apparatus in the context of the government’s efforts to combat crime.

“Torture and ill treatment during detention are generalized in Mexico, and occur in a context of impunity,” the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, wrote in the report he presented on Monday before the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

The report was based on a fact-finding mission Méndez made to Mexico last spring, and says methods used include beatings, electric shocks, suffocation, waterboarding, forced nudity and rape, as well as threats and insults.

Méndez’s report links torture in Mexico to government efforts to combat the country’s drug cartels, saying the majority of cases he studied involved victims detained for alleged links with organized crime. He also implicates local, state and federal police in the practice, as well as the armed forces.

U.S. news outlets appear to have forgotten that the Juarez Cartel and multiple acts of corruption have been linked to the election of the current Mexican President, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Mexican president’s ties to cartels, the mysterious release from prison of major cartel figures during his presidency, and the fact that regions of Mexico are under operational control of these paramilitary transnational criminal organizations during his presidency are rarely, if ever, reported in the U.S. The outrageous number of journalists who have been murdered or who have simply disappeared in Peña Nieto’s Mexico is also rarely reported.

Mexico is on the Verge of a Civil War! Police RUN from Rioters! Mexico city police flee for their lives after violent protesters overrun their blockades. Mexicans are outrage over gas prices, the border wall, and the liberal media fueling protests against the sitting president after he had a conversation with Donald Trump over the phone. This is Mexicans response to that conversation.

Here, we are talking about a community whose own analysts have complained that their superiors distort their reports for political purposes. In just the past few years, they have told us that they had “high confidence” that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons programs in 2003; that the NSA was not collecting metadata on millions of Americans; and that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate, “largely secular” organization. We have learned that the Obama administration intentionally perpetrated a disinformation campaign — complete with a compliant media “echo chamber” — to sell the public on the Iran nuclear deal (and the fiction that Iran’s regime was moderating). We have seen U.S. intelligence and law enforcement complicit in the Obama administration’s schemes to convince the public that “violent extremism,” not radical Islam, is the explanation for terrorist attacks; that a jihadist mass-murder attack targeting soldiers about to deploy to Afghanistan was “workplace violence”; that al-Qaeda had been “decimated”; that the threat of the ISIS “jayvee” team was exaggerated; and that the Benghazi massacre was not really a terrorist attack but a “protest” gone awry over an anti-Muslim video.

The DHS/FBI Joint Analysis Report on Russian information operations, which the administration refers to as “Grizzly Steppe,” is a disappointing and counterproductive document. The problems with the report are numerous and have been well documented by professionals in the computer security area. But the culture of secrecy and the lack of independent sources of verification that gave rise to it are far more pervasive.

Among the problems in the report: Instead of clearly mapping out the evidence linking the cyber espionage operations to Russia, the report provides generic charts on tradecraft and phishing techniques that apply to just about every cyber espionage campaign I and others have ever studied.

At the centre of the report (page 4) is a table that unhelpfully lumps together, without explanation, several different names attributed to Russian-associated cyber espionage campaigns alongside names of malicious software and exploits that have little or no direct link to Russia.

An appendix includes a spreadsheet meant to provide “Indicators of Compromise,” long lists of technical details supposedly associated with the espionage campaign. These include IP addresses, malware signatures, and command and control infrastructure, which network defenders are supposed to use to ward off Russian-backed espionage, and which would ostensibly be used to “fingerprint” Russia as the culprit. Unfortunately, many of these are out of date or irrelevant, or are used by multiple cyber espionage campaigns and not ones exclusively associated with Russia. To give just one example, journalist Micah Lee analyzed the IP addresses contained in the appendix, and found over 40 percent of them are exit nodes of the anonymizer Tor (meaning anyone in the world using Tor could be associated with these IP addresses). It is a disservice to both the general public and expert researchers to not clarify the degrees of confidence associated with each indicator. Without proper categorization or context, the indicators satisfy neither aim of helping network defenders or proving attribution.

De tog også anstød af at Trump passer sin twitter-konto og sin takke-turne og kun sparsomt deltager i de sikkerhedspolitiske møder. “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years” forklarede han Fox News sin ‘efter-behov’ tilgang.

The effect, therefore of the Obama decision to push for, and abstain from, a vote on this resolution is to deliberately tie the hands of the president’s successors, in particular President-elect Trump. That is why Trump did the right thing in reaction to Obama’s provocation. Had the lame-duck president not tried to tie the incoming president’s hands, Trump would not have intervened at this time. But if Trump had not urged the Egyptians to withdraw the resolution, he would have made it far more difficult for himself to try to bring about a negotiated resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The reason for this is that a Security Council resolution declaring the 1967 border to be sacrosanct, and any building behind those boarders to be illegal, would make it impossible for Palestinian leaders to accept less in a negotiation. Moreover, the passage of such a resolution would disincentivize the Palestinians from accepting Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s invitation to sit down and negotiate with no preconditions. Any such negotiations would require painful sacrifices on both sides if a resolution were to be reached. And a Security Council resolution siding with the Palestinians would give the Palestinians the false hope that they could get a state through the United Nations without having to make painful sacrifices.

Trump has turned out to be the most energetic president-elect America has seen in a long time, intervening to save jobs and contain federal spending. Like Teddy Roosevelt, Trump is using the megaphone of his bully pulpit to get results.

He rescued 1,000 jobs by dangling tax incentives and the threat of retaliatory tariffs to convince air conditioning company Carrier not to move production from Indiana to Mexico. Democrats quibble over the number of jobs saved, but there’s no escaping the symbolism: Trump is on the side of workers, not big corporations.

Now there’s talk of a Trump effect, as more companies fearful of Trump’s “big stick” think twice about outsourcing American jobs.

Bill Ford, the chairman at Ford Motor Co., called Trump after the election to say the automaker changed its mind about moving some vehicle production offshore. Trump also said he lobbied Apple CEO Tim Cook about bringing manufacturing back to the United States.

“One of the things that will be a real achievement for me is when I get Apple to build a big plant in the United States, or many big plants in the United States, where instead of going to China, and going to Vietnam, and going to the places that you go to, you’re making your product right here,” Trump said he told Cook, according to a post-election interview with The New York Times.

Trump’s preinaugural swagger goes beyond the jobs front.

After Trump complained about the price tag for building the next Air Force One, the CEO of Boeing promised to limit costs. Trump put health care companies on notice that he wants drug prices, a major factor in exploding Medicare costs, to come down. His targeting of “out of control” overruns in the construction of F-35 fighter jets suggests defense contractors will feel the lash.

Trump may not get everything he wants, but if the transition is any indication, he seems to understand what his opponents do not. His success will hinge on jobs and bringing change to Washington, not how often he meets with intelligence briefers.

In 1989, following her tenure as President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick described how the Palestinians have used the UN to destroy Israel.

Following outgoing US President Barack Obama’s assault on Israel at the UN Security Council last Friday, longtime UN observer Claudia Rossett wrote an important article at PJMedia where she recalled Kirkpatrick’s words.

In “How the PLO was legitimized,” published in Commentary, Kirkpatrick said that Yasser Arafat and the PLO worked “to come to power through international diplomacy – reinforced by murder.”

Kirkpatrick explained, “The long march through the UN has produced many benefits for the PLO. It has created a people where there was none; a claim where there was none. Now the PLO is seeking to create a state where there already is one. That will take more than resolutions and more than an ‘international peace conference.’ But having succeeded so well over the years in its campaign to delegitimize Israel, the PLO might yet also succeed in bringing the campaign to a triumphant conclusion, with consequences for the Jewish state that would be nothing short of catastrophic.”

As Rossett noted, in falsely arguing that Obama’s support for Friday’s UN Security Council Resolution 2334 is in line with Reagan’s policies, Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power deliberately distorted the historical record of US policy toward Israel and the PLO-led UN onslaught against the Jewish state.

The Palestinians have completed the hijacking of every major UN institution. The 2016 General Assembly has adopted nineteen resolutions condemning Israel and nine critical of all other UN states combined. The 2016 Commission on the Status of Women adopted one resolution condemning Israel and zero on any other state. The 2016 UN Human Rights Council celebrated ten years of adopting more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than any other place on earth. And now – to the applause of the assembled – the Palestinians can add the UN Security Council to their list.

Resolution sponsors Malaysia and New Zealand explained UN-think to the Council this way: Israeli settlements are “the single biggest threat to peace” and the “primary threat to the viability of the two-state solution.” Not seven decades of unremitting Arab terror and violent rejection of Jewish self-determination in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

At its core, this UN move is a head-on assault on American democracy. President Obama knew full well he did not have Congressional support for the Iran deal, so he went straight to the Security Council first. Likewise, he knew that there would have been overwhelming Congressional opposition to this resolution, so he carefully planned his stealth attack.

He waited until Congress was not in session. Members of his administration made periodic suggestions that nothing had been decided. There were occasional head fakes that he was “leaning” against it. He produced smiling photo-ops from a Hawaiian golf course with no obvious major foreign policy moves minutes away. Holiday time-outs were in full-swing across the country. And then he pounced, giving Israel virtually no notice of his intent not to veto.

Profound betrayal of a true democratic friend of the United States is the only possible description.

Just in time for Chanukah, President Barack Obama has unleashed all the anti-Jewish fury of his administration on the state of Israel. According to a senior Israeli official, both Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have been pushing a United Nations resolution behind the scenes that would essentially declare East Jerusalem, which includes the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount, non-Jewish territory off limits to Israel, as well as labeling any Jew living outside the pre-1967 armistice lines illegitimate.

The draft resolution is an utter rejection of Judaism’s claims to Jerusalem – a historical absurdity, since the only reason anyone cares about the spot is because of Judaism’s claims to it, which predated any Muslim claims by well over a millennium. It rejects Israel’s ability to defend itself by maintaining territory outside the “Auschwitz borders” of pre-1967 Israel. It ignores international law – the resolution says that Israel is occupying “Palestinian territory,” which makes no historical sense given the fact that there was never any sovereign Palestine, that the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded prior to 1967 and called for the full destruction of the state of Israel (as indeed, the Palestinian governing organizations continue to do), and that Israel’s enemies never agreed to any international agreement granting them sovereignty over the territory. Essentially, the UN calls for all areas outside the pre-1967 lines, which would include East Jerusalem, to become Judenrein.

This isn’t a major shock from the Obama administration, which has a long, inglorious history of Jew-hating activity when it comes to Israel. This is the same administration that signed an Iran deal that puts Israel’s very existence in jeopardy, that forced Israel to apologize for attempting to blockade arms shipments to the terrorist group Hamas, that tried to stymie Israel’s ability to defend herself during a rocket war with Hamas, that pressures Israel consistently to make concessions to would-be Jew-murderers, that goes silent when American Jews are killed in Israel, that funds a terrorist unity government.

Just weeks before leaving office, he could not resist the opportunity to take one more swipe at Israel—and to do real harm. So he will leave with his record on Israel in ruins, and he will leave Democrats even worse off.

It’s pretty clear that he does not care. Obama has gotten himself elected twice, the second time by a decreased margin (the only time a president has been reelected by fewer votes than in his first term), but he has laid waste to his party. In the House, the Senate, the state governorships, and the state legislatures, the Democrats have suffered loss after loss. Today’s anti-Israel action will further damage the Democratic party, by driving some Jews if not toward the Republicans then at least away from the Democrats and toward neutrality. Donald Trump’s clear statement on Thursday that he favored a veto, Netanyahu’s fervent pleas for one, and the Egyptian action in postponing the vote show where Obama stood: not with Israel, not even with Egypt, but with the Palestinians. Pleas for a veto from Democrats in Congress were ignored by the White House.

Does the resolution matter? It does. The text declares that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.” This may turn both settlers—even those in major blocs like Maale Adumim, that everyone knows Israel will keep in any peace deal—and Israeli officials into criminals in some countries, subject to prosecution there or in the International Criminal Court. The text demands “that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” Now add this wording to the previous line and it means that even construction in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City is “a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution also “calls upon all States, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967.” This is a call to boycott products of the Golan, the West Bank, and parts of Jerusalem, and support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.

Yet Barack Obama thought this was all fine and refused to veto.

National Review forsøger at forstå omfanget af resolutionen og spørger “If an Israeli lives in a suburb of Jerusalem, is he or she now a criminal? Can he be arrested and tried in activist courts in Europe or in international legal tribunals?“. Abrams spørger “The remaining question is whether Jewish leaders and Democratic politicians who vouched for Obama and defended him for eight years will now tell the truth”. Jonah Goldberg skriver i samme ånd at “Obama has just thrown [liberal Jews and other supporters of Israel] under the bus” med sit forræderi og blandt Obamas egne partikammerater er der også vrede, skriver The Tower. I det venstreorienterede jødiske Tablet Magazine skriver Lee Smith at “The lame-duck president is dismantling the alliance system that has kept America and much of the rest of the world secure”

In a sense, the UN vote is a perfect bookend to Obama’s Presidency. A man who came to office promising to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel, has done exactly that by breaking with decades of American policy. It is also seeking—contrary to established tradition and practice, which strictly prohibit such lame-duck actions—to tie the hands of the next White House, which has already made its pro-Israel posture clear.

No doubt that many of those critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship will defend and applaud the administration’s action, even as the effects of the resolution are obscene. So what if it enshrines in international law the fact that Jews can’t build homes or have sovereign access to their holy sites in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for more than 3000 years? Israel, as Kerry said, is too prosperous to care about peace with the Palestinians. Maybe some hardship will shake some sense into the Jewish State—which after all, could easily have made a just and secure peace with the Palestinian leadership at any time over the past two decades, if that’s what it wanted to do. Accounts to the contrary, from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, say, or left-wing Israeli politicians like former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the late Shimon Peres, are simply propaganda generated by the pro-Israel Lobby, whose wings the President has thankfully clipped.

But the Obama Administration’s abstention isn’t just about Israel or bilateral relations with a vital partner in a key region. It’s also about the prestige of the United States and its power—the power, for instance, undergirding international institutions like the United Nations. Consider how the Obama Administration has used the UN the last several years—to legalize the nuclear program of Iran, a state sponsor of terror, and make it illegal for Jews to build in their historical homeland. In Turtle Bay, the White House partners with sclerotic socialist kleptocracies like Venezuela in order to punish allies, like Israel. Is this American moral leadership? For Sean Penn, maybe.

Within a couple of hours, Egypt withdrew the resolution, at least temporarily, and its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, called Mr. Trump to discuss how “to establish true peace in the Middle East,” according to an aide to the president-elect.

“I’d like to recognize the fact that after eight years of Pajama Boys, it’s time for the alpha males to come back,” he added. “How appropriate that we’ve got three Marines from the same division, legendary figures in uniform, to represent three of the key posts in the new administration! The fact is, having met Donald Trump a long time ago, and talking about national security issues, one of the first things that was clear to me from this businessman, this very special businessman, is that he understands we are at war, Raheem. He gets it. And he wants to win that war. He knows he’s not going to do it with limp-wristed Pajama Boys. Who better than a bunch of legendary Devil Dogs to do it? So yeah, it’s baloney, and it’s very cool in my opinion.”

Kassam turned to a discussion posted at The Gorka Briefing, in which Dr. Gorka argued that “Europe is collapsing.”

“I think it’s patently obvious that the Trump Train was the result, in part, a reflection of, the general rejection of centralized federative bureaucracy, and as a result, we have Brexit foreshadow the future of what used to be called Project Europe,” Gorka elucidated. “And the fact is, people are waking up. They’re rejecting faceless bureaucracy. We see it all across the continent. Brexit isn’t a uniquely British phenomena. As a result, we will see more and more people say, ‘Enough is enough. We want national sovereignty. We want national security most important of all.’ And as a result, I think Project Europe is on the ropes.”

Den mest markante alfahan er tidligere general i det amerikanske marinekorps James Matthis, en mand der selvfølgeligt erkender, at “there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot”. National Reviews Tom Rogan kalder Matthis “at once a scholar and a warrior” og begynder sin beskrivelse med citatet “I don’t have worry and stress. I cause worry and stress!”, bl.a fordi sin “…annihilation upon al-Qaeda in Iraq”

Iran has particular reason for concern. Commanding CENTCOM, Mattis pushed for tough realism in constraining the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary expansionism. He recognizes that Iran’s leaders are rational actors, but he also knows that their revolutionary impulses must be checked. For this, he earned the ire of President Obama, who was so intent on kowtowing to the Iranian regime. But now he is set to take over the Pentagon, and Khamenei and the Qassem-crew have much to fear.

First, Mattis is likely to push Trump to focus on fixing the Iran nuclear deal. This will likely entail reducing Iranian cheating on inspections protocols and Iranian ballistic-missile research. If Trump and Mattis work with U.S. allies (notably the French) who are concerned about President Obama’s failure to enforce the deal, Iran could face rougher waters next year. Mattis has suggested blockading the country if the regime tries to play hard ball. It’s a good idea.

Second, a Mattis Pentagon will likely take tougher action against Iranian aggression in the Middle East. As I’ve noted, President Obama has largely ignored Iranian malevolence in states such as Lebanon and Iraq. That needs to be remedied, and quickly.

Third, Mattis will deter Iranian terrorism against America. That imperative is real. In 2011, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards — as Mattis himself explains — tried to murder the then-Saudi ambassador to the United States. The plan involved blowing up a Washington D.C. restaurant and everyone in it. He’s the incarnation of the First Marine Division motto, ‘No better friend, no worse enemy.’

Fourth, Mattis’s realism will be useful in helping the U.S. to confront Sunni extremism more effectively. As I’ve explained before, thanks to his supplication to Iran, President Obama has alienated America’s Sunni-Arab allies. Mattis, who is adored by the Sunni-Arab monarchies for his honest courage, offers the Trump administration a chance to renew those bonds. That means new potential for a Sunni-Arab crackdown on Sunni fundraising for groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda. It also means we might see more special forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria.

“Who knows? American red lines might even make a comeback.” slutter Rogan.

I think it’s very clear that this enemy has decided that the war, the real war for them, will be fought in the narrative, in the media. This is not a place where we’re going to take the enemy’s capital and run up our flag and drink their coffee and that sort of thing.

Contrary to media misrepresentations, many of the supposedly spontaneous, organic, anti-Trump protests we have witnessed in cities from coast to coast were in fact carefully planned and orchestrated, in advance, by a pro-Communist organization called the ANSWER Coalition, which draws its name from the acronym for “Act Now to Stop War and End Racism.” ANSWER was established in 2001 by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, a group staffed in large part by members of the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. In 2002, the libertarian author Stephen Suleyman Schwartz described ANSWER as an “ultra-Stalinist network” whose members served as “active propaganda agents for Serbia, Iraq, and North Korea, as well as Cuba, countries they repeatedly visit and acclaim.”

Since its inception, ANSWER has consistently depicted the United States as a racist, sexist, imperialistic, militaristic nation guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity—in other words, a wellspring of pure evil. When ANSWER became a leading organizer of the massive post-9/11 demonstrations against the Patriot Act and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it formed alliances with other likeminded entities such as Not In Our Name (a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party) and United For Peace and Justice (a pro-Castro group devoted to smearing America as a cesspool of bigotry and oppression).

(…)

The leaders and organizers of the anti-Trump protests that are currently making so much noise in cities across America, are faithfully following the blueprint of Hillary Clinton’s famous mentor, Saul Alinsky, who urged radical activists to periodically stage loud, defiant, massive protest rallies expressing rage and discontent. Such demonstrations are designed to give onlookers the impression that a mass movement is preparing to shift into high gear, and that its present size is but a fraction of what it eventually will become. A “mass impression,” said Alinsky, can be lasting and intimidating: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have…. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”

The first one to really go viral involved a Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana who claimed to have had her hijab ripped off and her wallet stolen the day after Trump’s election by two white men wearing Trump hats. But on Thursday, local police announced that the young woman had admitted she fabricated the story. “This incident is no longer under investigation,” the Lafayette Police Department said in a press release.

In another incident, this one in San Diego, a young Muslim woman’s purse and car were stolen by one white male and one Hispanic male. While the men allegedly made negative comments about Muslims, it seems car stealing was more their motivation than harassment or intimidation—which is obviously shitty, but not necessarily a Trump-inspired act of bigotry.

And an alleged incident of a gay man named Chris Ball getting beaten up by Trump supporters in Santa Monica on election night seems to have not happened the way it was initially recounted, if the incident even happened at all. The Santa Monica Police Department posted a message to Facebook Thursday saying that neither the department nor city officials had “received any information indicating this crime occurred in the City of Santa Monica” and “a check of local hospitals revealed there was no victim of any such incident admitted or treated.”

(…)

Other anti-Semitic imagery—such as “Sieg Heil 2016″ spray-painted on an abandoned store front in Philadelphia—may have been legit expressions of bigotry or may have been similar attempts at commentary on Trump’s election; it’s unclear because no one is taking credit for them. The bulk of racist graffiti incidents appear to have happened around middle- and high-schools, which doesn’t make their messages any less hurtful, I’m sure, but does suggest a phenomenon driven by mean and immature kids rather than rogue bands of serious neo-Nazis.

And while all sorts of horrible incidents are being reported on Twitter and Facebook… well, anyone can say anything on Twitter and Facebook. The bulk of these stories are “friend of a friend” told me types. But if men were really going around pulling knives on Muslim women on public buses in Trump’s name, there would at least be local or campus news reports of it. Same, too, for the alleged wave of transgender teen suicides which keep getting mentioned in media but for which no one can offer any evidence. (Update: more on the alleged suicides here.)

(…)

Update, November 12: Two more tales of race-based and Trump-inspired harassment have begun to unravel…

What’s indisputable is that Hillary Clinton jeopardized classified information on thousands of occasions in her reckless attempt to hide pay-to-play corruption at her State Department. This alone should be disqualifying for anyone seeking the presidency, a job that is supposed to begin each morning with a top secret intelligence briefing.

He might be seeking to restore his badly damaged reputation, recognizing that the damage he has inflicted on the FBI is substantial. Three days ago, American Thinker published an open letter from a retired FBI Agent, Hugh Galyean, that laid out some of the damage Comey has inflicted on the institution he leads. There is little doubt that this reached many in the FBI family, putting in print what people have only whispered about. If those silenced voices start speaking out, Comey could face a serious loss of face. In this scenario, he is heading off a staff rebellion, possibly including mass resignations.

Rush Limbaugh today discussed an alternative theory, that by announcing an FBI Investigation resuming, Comey is putting a lid on further attention to Wikileaks. I guess this means that Clinton forces will argue we must wait for the investigation to be complete (after the election) before speaking about what the evil Russians are planting into our politics.

It is possible that something so dramatic came up in the pertinent emails that postponing a public reaction by not announcing the reopening of the investigation would, be regarded as political interference by covering up a smoking gun until after the election. In this scenario, Comey is assuming the evidence cannot be suppressed, and that he would be held accountable after it comes out. This scenario also indicates that we could be headed for a constitutional crisis, involving the possible indictment of a president-elect before an election. Or the evidence being turned over to the House of Representatives for impeachment hearings.

“The experience left the president and first lady shaken and worried,” said the source. “It was clear to them that Hillary was not well. They know how exhausting and draining a presidential campaign is. Clearly, the Hillary they saw in the White House was different than the Hillary the public has seen during her rallies and in the debates.

“They concluded that there was no way that Hillary could make it through such a demanding ordeal without getting some help from booster drugs.”

“Democrat Hillary Clinton has a 9-point lead over Republican Donald Trump in Ohio following the news of Trump’s vulgar talk about women and after the second debate between the candidates, according to a statewide poll released today by Baldwin Wallace University in Berea.” kunne man læse for to uger siden på Cleveland.com. Gode nyheder for Hillary Clintons kampagne da Ohio er en vigtig sving-stat.

Being President is a tough job. It’s one of the only jobs where you get a new approval rating every day. Now that we have this thing called social media, the President gets hundreds of judgments every hour of every day, many of them unpleasant. For the second time, President Obama has agreed to read them for our second-ever Presidential Edition of #MeanTweets.

But before the president took the stage, Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper strode to the podium and, citing polls showing Donald Trump with a slight lead in the crucial swing state, launched into what he called a “pep talk.”

“Do you think we’re a Trump state, Ohio?”

“No,” the crowd roared.

“I don’t think so,” he called back to them. “We’re the state that elected President Obama in 2008 and 2012. We are the state that elects [Senator] Sherrod Brown, the progressive lion, again and again.”

“One more reminder,” he shouted as the crowd cheered. “Donald Trump couldn’t even win the primary here. This isn’t Trump country.”

Hillary has laughed off questions of a potential indictment since the beginning, sneered at suggestions that her scandal might keep her out of the White House. Even more frightening than her confidence that she won’t be indicted is her unshakable faith that she’ll be elected. Hillary’s not concerned about the coming election; she doesn’t campaign or hold press conferences, and she has few rallies. It’s almost as if she doesn’t really need the votes.

That’s probably a good thing for her, since Hillary proved in the primaries that she can’t get the votes. She had to cheat to beat Bernie Sanders, a 73-year-old socialist out of a win. She had to tamp down Bernie supporters’ passion and enthusiasm and force them to accept her stale, depressing message.

The truth is, a large chunk of the Democrat base doesn’t like Hillary. In fact, many can’t stand her.

So how is she winning? I mean, that’s all we hear, right? Hillary’s winning in a landslide, has a monumental lead that can’t be overcome. Hillary’s shown to be winning because the media is “with her,” or should I say “with them”? Our once free press is working hand in hand with usurpers to engage in sedition and open treason; to defeat the Republican nominee, Donald Trump; and to impose a sick, evil woman, a criminal as our new leader.

To accomplish this goal, the press uses wartime psychological operations (psy ops), Soviet-style propaganda, and gaslighting to deceive, confuse, disrupt, and demoralize the enemy (that would be we).

Psyops Techniques:

False flags- staged events where the perpetrator is concealed and another party blamed.

The James O’Keefe videos show Democrat operatives bragging on how they stage violent protests at Trump rallies, that they have a national network to cover all locations. The media are all in to blame Trump, paint him as an angry man who foments violence.

Shock and awe- the method of displaying overwhelming force or impressive technology to intimidate or demoralize an enemy.

Think polls, political experts who tell us it’s over, Hillary’s leads are insurmountable, there’s not enough time for Trump to “catch up.”

Propaganda:

Includes name-calling, manipulated statistics, and other techniques. The media’s favorite is the bandwagon effect. This tactic appeals to people’s desire to be on the winning team (”voters abandoning Donald Trump in droves” and “Hillary’s running away with the election”).

Gaslighting:

This is the left’s most insidious tool, based on deception and false information to make us doubt our own perceptions, our sanity.

Media show Trump getting trounced while they withhold more current data. They dismiss as anecdotal (that’s the new buzzword for meaningless) empirical evidence that points to a Trump landslide – yard signs, bumper stickers, massive crowds, and unprecedented enthusiasm. Their “experts” tell us the overflow cheering crowds mean nothing, don’t “translate” to votes.

And how many times must they tell us there is no voter fraud? Yet O’Keefe has a video with a Democrat operative explaining how to accomplish mass voter fraud, and there’s mounting evidence to confirm voter fraud on a pandemic scale.

Psychological warfare leaves its victims feeling off balance, filled with self-doubt, isolated, and less likely to fight for our candidate. This is the damage our media and government inflict on their own people. The free press we’ve depended on to expose corruption, ensure fair elections, and protect democracy is now part of the corruption, rigging the elections, and defeating democracy. Our protector turned assassin.

Now the media huddle with the left to plot their end run on democracy. It’s a sprint to the finish line. How far will they go? All the way, folks. I can see networks calling the race for Hillary even if they know it’s based on fraud. I can picture Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, President Obama, our entire government and media telling us we must have a peaceful transition, that we can’t question the results under any conditions. Oh, wait – they’re already doing that.

And now they’re setting up in case of a Trump landslide. We could get “fake election results” by Russian hackers, they say. There will be no “peaceful transition of power” if they lose.

Part III of the undercover Project Veritas Action investigation dives further into the back room dealings of Democratic politics. It exposes prohibited communications between Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC and the non-profit organization Americans United for Change. And, it’s all disguised as a duck. In this video, several Project Veritas Action undercover journalists catch Democracy Partners founder directly implicating Hillary Clinton in FEC violations. “In the end, it was the candidate, Hillary Clinton, the future president of the United States, who wanted ducks on the ground,” says Creamer in one of several exchanges. “So, by God, we would get ducks on the ground.” It is made clear that high-level DNC operative Creamer realized that this direct coordination between Democracy Partners and the campaign would be damning when he said: “Don’t repeat that to anybody.” The first video explained the dark secrets and the hidden connections and organizations the Clinton campaign uses to incite violence at Trump rallies. The second video exposed a diabolical step-by-step voter fraud strategy discussed by top Democratic operatives and showed one key operative admitting that the Democrats have been rigging elections for fifty years. This latest video takes this investigation even further.

“We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to,” Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.

“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world,” Obama added.

This summer, President Obama was often golfing. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were promising to let the world be. The end of summer seemed sleepy, the world relatively calm.

The summer of 1914 in Europe also seemed quiet. But on July 28, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip with help from his accomplices, fellow Serbian separatists. That isolated act sparked World War I.

In the summer of 1939, most observers thought Adolf Hitler was finally through with his serial bullying. Appeasement supposedly had satiated his once enormous territorial appetites. But on September 1, Nazi Germany unexpectedly invaded Poland and touched off World War II, which consumed some 60 million lives.

(…)

Russia has been massing troops on its border with Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin apparently believes that Europe is in utter disarray and assumes that President Obama remains most interested in apologizing to foreigners for the past evils of the United States. Putin is wagering that no tired Western power could or would stop his reabsorption of Ukraine — or the Baltic states next. Who in hip Amsterdam cares what happens to faraway Kiev?

Iran swapped American hostages for cash. An Iranian missile narrowly missed a U.S. aircraft carrier not long ago. Iranians hijacked an American boat and buzzed our warships in the Persian Gulf. There are frequent promises from Tehran to destroy either Israel, America, or both. So much for the peace dividend of the “Iran deal.”

North Korea is more than just delusional. Recent nuclear tests and missile launches toward Japan suggest that North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un actually believes that he could win a war — and thereby gain even larger concessions from the West and from his Asian neighbors.

Radical Islamists likewise seem emboldened to try more attacks on the premise that Western nations will hardly respond with overwhelming power. The past weekend brought pipe bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey as well as a mass stabbing in a Minnesota mall — and American frustration.

Europe and the United States have been bewildered by huge numbers of largely young male migrants from the war-torn Middle East. Political correctness has paralyzed Western leaders from even articulating the threat, much less replying to it.

Instead, the American government appears more concerned with shutting down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, ensuring that no administration official utters the words “Islamic terror,” and issuing warnings to Americans not to lash out due to their supposedly innate prejudices.

Aggressors are also encouraged by vast cutbacks in the U.S. defense budget. The lame-duck Obama presidency, lead-from-behind policies, and a culturally and racially divided America reflect voter weariness with overseas commitments.

(…)

Obama apparently assumes he can leave office as a peacemaker before his appeased chickens come home to roost in violent fashion. He has assured us that the world has never been calmer and quieter.

Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tried to downplay Trump’s threat, later saying it was just “a quip.” However, some prominent lawyers and legal scholars took umbrage at the threat and expressed alarm. Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe told Fortune that even threatening such a thing was “incompatible with the survival of a stable constitutional republic,” while carrying out such a threat would constitute an “impeachable offense.”
Eric Holder, former U.S. Attorney General in the Obama Administration, immediately tweeted that Trump’s comment rendered him “unfit” for office.

Fortune reached out to all the former U.S. attorneys general that we could locate (including Holder), as well as several other prominent legal authorities and presidential historians, to get their views. Was what candidate Trump proposed legal? Was there precedent for it? Was it good policy? Here are the answers we’ve received so far.
Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School
(Via email:) “Under the laws and Justice Department regulations governing federal prosecution, a President Trump would not have legal authority to direct the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to ‘look into’ Hillary Clinton’s email situation or the Clinton Foundation or anything else. That’s not within a President’s power.

The only precedents for the kind of vow Trump made in last night’s debate are to be found in dictatorships and banana republics, not the United States. The closest parallel may be what [Viktor] Yanukovych (a former Paul Manafort client) did to [Yulia] Tymoshenko in Ukraine.

Making threats or vows to use a nation’s criminal justice system against one’s vanquished political opponent is worse than terrible policy: it’s incompatible with the survival of a stable constitutional republic and, under our Constitution, would represent an abuse of power so grave that it would be an impeachable offense—one reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s deliberate use of the IRS to go after his political enemies.”

[In a second email, Tribe added that] “some of the political leaders who’ve jailed their political opponents [in the past] have been Hugo Chávez, Recep Erdo?an, Robert Mugabe, Manuel Noriega, Augusto Pinochet and, of course, Vladimir Putin.”

This is manifestly not a case of banana-republic criminalization of politics. Trump was not threatening to go after Clinton because she has the temerity to oppose him politically. He was committing to have a special prosecutor investigate Clinton for mishandling classified information, destroying government files, and obstruction of justice — criminal misconduct that has nothing to do with being a political adversary of Trump’s, and for which others who commit similar felonies go to jail.
The Obama administration investigated Mrs. Clinton, at least ostensibly, for over a year. Is Professor Burns saying a politician should only be investigated by her political allies and may otherwise violate the law with impunity?

To get a sense of what a banana-republic Justice Department looks like, Burns might want to have a look at the Obama administration’s prosecutions of Dinesh D’Souza and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. D’Souza is a political critic of the president’s who was subjected to a criminal prosecution (in which the Justice Department pushed for a severe jail sentence, which the judge declined to impose) for a campaign-finance violation of the petty sort that the Justice Department routinely allows to be settled by a civil fine. (For example, it declined to prosecute the Obama 2008 campaign for offenses that dwarfed D’Souza’s.) Nakoula, the producer of the anti-Muslim video the Obama administration falsely portrayed as the catalyst of the Benghazi massacre, was subjected to a scapegoat prosecution (under the guise of a supervised-release violation) intended to bolster the administration’s “blame the video” narrative.

Prosecuting a person who happens to be a politician for serious crimes is an affirmation of the American principle that no one is above the law.

Ifølge Daily Mail har Obama, Barak Hussein, været “…so concerned about Hillary Clinton’s health that he recently offered to arrange a secret medical checkup for her at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center”

Hillary declined the offer because she feared the media would find out about her Walter Reed visit and learn the truth about her medical condition—that she is suffering from arrhythmia (an abnormal heart beat), a leaking heart valve, chronic low blood pressure, insufficient blood flow, a tendency to form life-threatening blood clots, and troubling side effects from her medications.

So exclaimed Hillary Clinton’s close aide and confidante, Huma Abedin. The FBI had just shown her an old e-mail exchange, over Clinton’s private account, between the then-secretary of state and a second person, whose name Abedin did not recognize. The FBI then did what the FBI is never supposed to do: The agents informed their interviewee (Abedin) of the identity of the second person. It was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, using a pseudonym to conduct communications over a non-secure e-mail system — something anyone with a high-level security clearance, such as Huma Abedin, would instantly realize was a major breach.

(…)

Thanks to Friday’s FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau’s year-long foray (“investigation” would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama’s conflict of interest.

As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.

To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.

Still, the difference in scale is not a difference in kind. In terms of the federal laws that criminalize mishandling of classified information, Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.

(…)

To summarize, we have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president’s own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama. From these facts and circumstances, we must deduce that it is possible, if not highly likely, that President Obama himself has been grossly negligent in handling classified information.

That is why the Clinton e-mail scandal never had a chance of leading to criminal charges.

Hillary Clinton co-founded the Senate India Caucus, which anti-offshoring advocates say champions “issues important to India, including outsourcing and H-1B and L-1 visas.”

Clinton in 2005: “I am delighted to be the Senator from Punjab as well as from New York.”

Clinton has called for nearly doubling the controversial H-1B guest worker program—suggesting that American workers lack the skills to fill American jobs. She has also defended the cheap labor practices of an Indian outsourcing firm, to which the Clinton Foundation has financial ties: “We are not against all outsourcing; we are not in favor of putting up fences,” she said.

Shortly after the CEO of HCL—the Indian firm that helped lay off 250 American Disney workers in Orlando— called American tech graduates “unemployable”, Bill Clinton delivered a speech to HCL to the tune of nearly a quarter of a million dollars at Disney World in Orlando.

Reports note that Clinton has repeatedly “telegraphed” her support for a globalized world to the Indian community. At a conference of 14,000 Indian Americans, Bill Clinton extolled the virtues of “open borders, easy travel, easy immigration”.

In 2007, Barack Obama slammed “Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)’s personal, financial and political ties to India… It’s all about the money,” his campaign wrote.

The destruction, the annihilation, the conspiracy to destroy the middle class is real. The murder of the middle class is not a theory. It’s not an opinion. It’s not a figgment of my imagination. It’s a proven fact. Three studies were published backing up what I’m saying. Sometimes, timing isn’t important—it’s everything.

(…)

Pew’s figures reveal a steady erosion of America’s middle class.

The steepest declines were seen in industrial towns. It is no coincidence that these job and income losses came from the predominantly white working and middle class. But the trend isn’t just seen in the Midwest or among working class, blue-collar whites. The same trend and the same declines can be found among college-educated white-collar Americans. Pew Research found that even in areas of high-tech reinvention such as Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina, incomes are falling and the middle class is shrinking.

Pew found that even in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, where over six hundred thousand new residents have arrived since 2000, heavily weighted toward college degrees, median household income (adjusted for inflation) fell from $83,000 in 1999 to under $76,000 in 2014.

This clearly shows the murder of the middle class. The rich are getting richer, while the poor are taken care of by the government and paid for by middle-class taxpayers. The savaged middle class is being taxed and regulated so heavily to pay for the poor that eventually there will be no more middle-class jobs, no more middle-class families. Our incomes are down, our jobs are disappearing, our bills are escalating, our health care costs are exploding (thanks to Obamacare), and our taxes are dramatically higher. For America’s middle class, this is a disaster of epic proportions.

So now you know why we’re angry. We have every reason to be angry. We’ve been targeted for extinction.

When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.

We don’t need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages. Similarly, the flood of recent news reports on abuse of the H-1B visa program shows that firms will quickly dismiss their current tech workforce when they find cheaper immigrant workers.

Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer.

But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.

When we look at the overall value of immigration, there’s one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion—a burden that falls on the native population.

What does it all add up to? The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all. Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.

Americans are tired of an economic elite that ignores them. Americans know the game is rigged against them. For generations Americans could make their way from the bottom to the top of the heap by starting businesses. In some periods more of them succeeded than others, but everyone knew someone who got rich more or less honestly. That came to a crashing end during the Obama Administration. There were fewer small firms with fewer workers in 2013 than there were in 2007.

ENTERPRISE EMPLOYMENT SIZE

NUMBER OF FIRMS

NUMBER OF ESTABLISHMENTS

EMPLOYMENT

02: 0-4

-129,985

-130,063

-212,803

03: 5-9

-67,969

-69,904

-451,075

04: 10-19

-44,291

-48,177

-598,105

05: <20

-242,245

-248,144

-1,261,983

06: 20-99

-29,358

-38,422

-1,225,253

07: 100-499

-3,322

4,737

-556,311

08: <500

-274,925

-281,829

-3,043,547

09: 500+

325

65,164

705,535

The deplorables look at the American economy as a lottery. They aren’t sophisticated, but they’re sly: They know the game is rigged, because there aren’t any winners. The American economy is more corrupt and more cartelized then at any time in its history. Productivity growth was negative for the past two quarters, and five-year productivity growth is the lowest since the stagflation of the 1970s.

Corporations are making money by gaming the regulatory system rather than deploying new technologies. Close to half of the increase in corporate profits during the past decade can be attributed to regulatory rent-seeking by large corporations, according to a June 2016 study by Boston University economist Jim Bessen. Bessen concluded that “investments in conventional capital assets and R&D account for a substantial part of the rise in valuations and profits especially during the 1990s. However, since 2000, political activity and regulation account for a surprisingly large share of the increase.”

She lied repeatedly about her emails. She lied when she said she had “turned over everything I was obligated to turn over” (FBI Director James Comey said the FBI “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not among the group of 30,000 e-mails returned by Secretary Clinton to state in 2014”). She lied when she said there was “no classified material” in her private emails .?.?. that there was nothing “classified at the time” .?.?. and that there was nothing “marked classified” in her private emails — all of which the FBI director said were untrue. And, to top it all off, she lied about her lies — declaring on national television that “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people” — a claim The Post’s Fact Checker gave “Four Pinocchios.”

Clinton lied to the American people about Benghazi. At 10:08 p.m. the night of the attack, she issued a statement that blamed the attack on “inflammatory material posted on the Internet” with no mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda. But an hour later, at 11:12 p.m. she emailed her daughter, Chelsea: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group.” The next day in a phone call with the Egyptian prime minister, Clinton said: “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest.” Yet two days later, as she welcomed the caskets of the fallen in Dover, Del., she blamed that attack on “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

She lied about a trip she made to Bosnia, claiming that she and her team arrived “under sniper fire,” skipped the arrival ceremony and “just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” In fact, a video shows her being greeted on the tarmac by Bosnian officials and an 8-year-old Muslim girl, Emina Bicakcic, who read a poem in English and told Clinton, “There is peace now.”

She lied about her family history. In 2015, she said she could relate to illegal immigrants because “all my grandparents” immigrated to the United States. When BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski pointed out that three of Clinton’s four grandparents were born in the United States, a Clinton spokesman said “her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants.”

And her dishonesty stretches back decades. As the late, great William Safire pointed out in a 1996 New York Times column, she delivered a “blizzard of lies” as first lady — about Whitewater, the firing of White House travel aides, her representation of a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S&L and how she made a 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading simply by studying the Wall Street Journal. Even back then, Safire concluded, Clinton was “a congenital liar.”

CNN added the word “racial” to Donald Trump’s Monday comments on terrorism and immigration and is running headlines reporting that the GOP presidential nominee spoke of using “racial profiling” to stop terrorism.

But a review of the transcript of Trump’s comments to Fox News that CNN quoted shows that Trump never used the word “racial” in his comments to the network and only spoke of “profiling.”

“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said Monday to Fox News. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in. They will check out.”

After Clinton’s struggles in the polls in Florida came up, Brooks said, “Yeah, but that’s not her fault. That’s because the media has forgotten what their constitutional duty is.”

He continued, “Well, the reason we have a free press, the whole reason it’s in the Constitution is to inform us, the electorate about what we’re voting on, and they’ve forgotten that. They think this is a circus. They think this is ‘dancing with the stars.’ And so, they have given Trump probably a trillion dollars’ worth of free press over the course of this campaign.”

When President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 launched the so-called War on Poverty, which enacted an unprecedented amount of antipoverty legislation and added many new layers to the American welfare state, he explained that his objective was to reduce dependency, “break the cycle of poverty,” and make “taxpayers out of tax eaters.” Johnson further claimed that his programs would bring to an end the “conditions that breed despair and violence,” those being “ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.” Of particular concern to Johnson was the disproportionately high rate of black poverty. In a famous June 1965 speech, the president suggested that the problems plaguing black Americans could not be solved by self-help: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line in a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’” said Johnson.

Thus began modern liberalism’s vicious and unrelenting assault on black Americans.

(…)

The results of welfare policies discouraging marriage and family were dramatic, as out-of-wedlock birthrates skyrocketed among all demographic groups in the U.S., but most notably African Americans. In the mid-1960s, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was scarcely 3% for whites, 7.7% for Americans overall, and 24.5% among blacks. By 1976, those figures had risen to nearly 10% for whites, 24.7% for Americans as a whole, and 50.3% for blacks specifically. And today, the numbers stand at 29% for whites, 41% for the nation overall, and 73% for blacks. In other words, the entire country is moving rapidly in the wrong direction, but blacks in particular have reached a point of veritable catastrophe.

The devastating societal consequences of family breakdown cannot be overstated. Father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of America’s economic ladder. Regardless of race or ethnicity, the poverty rate for single parents with children is several times higher than the corresponding rate for married couples with children. According to Robert Rector, senior research fellow with the Heritage Foundation, “the absence of marriage increases the frequency of child poverty 700 percent” and thus constitutes the single most reliable predictor of a self-perpetuating underclass. Articulating a similar theme many years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Nothing is so much needed as a secure family life for a people to pull themselves out of poverty.”

Children in single-parent households are burdened not only with economic, but also profound social and psychological, disadvantages. For example, youngsters raised by single parents, as compared to those who grow up in intact married homes, are more likely to be physically abused; to display emotional disorders; to smoke, drink, and use drugs; to perform poorly in school; to be suspended or expelled from school; to drop out of high school; to behave aggressively and violently; to be arrested for a juvenile crime; to serve jail time before age 30; and to go on to experience poverty as adults. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60% of rapists, 72% of adolescent murderers, and 70% of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. With regard to girls in particular, those raised by single mothers are more than twice as likely to give birth out-of-wedlock, thereby perpetuating the cycle of poverty for yet another generation.

The calamitous breakdown of the black family is a comparatively recent phenomenon, coinciding precisely with the rise of the welfare state. Throughout the epoch of slavery and into the early decades of the twentieth century, most black children grew up in two-parent households. Post-Civil War studies revealed that most black couples in their forties had been together for at least twenty years. In southern urban areas around 1880, nearly three-fourths of black households were husband- or father-present; in southern rural settings, the figure approached 86%. As of 1940, the illegitimacy rate among blacks nationwide was approximately 15%—scarcely one-fifth of the current figure. As late as 1950, black women were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9% of black families with children were headed by a single parent.

During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong, stable institution. Its cataclysmic destruction was subsequently set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that were built into the welfare system. As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams puts it: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do. And that is to destroy the black family.” Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell concurs: “The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”